The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang Yimou 1993)
Plot: "With The Story of Qiu Ju, internationally acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou shifts his attention from powerful historical dramas (Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou) to contemporary life. Gong Li plays the titular heroine, an average woman in a rural village whose life is unexceptional until her husband is physically attacked by the village elder. When the elder refuses to apologize, Qiu Ju decides to seek legal action with the help of a local magistrate. Soon, her quest for simple justice balloons into a series of frustrating battles with a complicated and unproductive bureaucracy. In contrast to the rich, painterly look of his previous films, Zhang adopts an unadorned, realistic style that allows the film's increasingly absurd situations to speak for themselves. Indeed, while the look at government gone wrong has serious underpinnings, the overall tone remains one of understated satire. As might be expected, The Story of Qiu Ju was received with greater appreciation by international critics than in its home country." ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide
Review From the New York Times Online
Review/Film Festival; Chinese Woman in Search of Justice
By Janet Maslin
Excerpt: "Zhang Yimou is the superb Chinese film maker whose life sounds like the stuff of legend (he is said to have "sold his blood to buy his first camera") and whose rural historical dramas (among them "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Ju Dou" ) would be accessible in any part of the globe. Now in "The Story of Qui Ju," which will be shown at the New York Film Festival tonight at 6:15 and on Sunday at 9:30 P.M., Mr. Zhang has attempted something more modern and no less fascinating. With the simplicity of a folk tale or a fable, he tells of a farmer's wife and her search for justice, and in the process he provides a remarkably detailed view of contemporary Chinese life."
Raise the Red Lantern.; The Story of Qiu
Ju
by John Dragon Young
Excerpt: "Other than the usual anthropological
and sociological treatments, the study of women in Chinese history has yet to
be confronted by historians (Jonathan Spence's The Death of Woman Wang, 1978,
is perhaps a rare exception). We may know plenty about arranged marriages or
how the subjection of women was intritutionalized, but, more often than not,
Chinese women are depicted as one-dimensional beings: victims of a male-dominated
social order who occasionally find escape by inflicting pain on others. The
classic figures are the Empress Dowager Cixi and Madam Mao, Jiang Qing. But
how did their inner worlds look? What were their psychological orientations,
especially toward the Chinese male? Were they cunning, suspicious, and deceitful
because these are traits of the Chinese female psyche?
"These two films by Zhang Zimou...provide some of the answers..."